Count Your Blessings

I’ve made it. We’ve made it. We’ve made it to the End of Term, we’ve dragged ourselves out of bed and into work and school before the sun was properly awake and returned home, picked our way through the fairy-lit dark, long after it had gone to bed for what feels like weeks. Everything about us was increasingly reluctant the further we advanced into December and the closer we got to the End Date and finally it is here. The children, exhausted by the effort of an eight-week term, have taken themselves off to bed early.

In a short few weeks, I don’t suppose I should refer to them as children any more, here or anywhere else. Next month, S will be 18, technically a fully-fledged man. L will enter her teens.  I will be one year closer to fifty (as will everyone else under fifty, I guess) and I am considerably greyer now than I was this time last year. Time, that constantly stretching, elastic beast, for all the eternal sense of the first night of the holidays, is speeding up.

When people ask me about my children, they no longer comment that I must have my hands full. I guess it must be obvious after all these years, but now, they are far more likely to give the knowing chuckle reserved for Mother of Teens than the rueful smile of Tired with Toddlers.

But here’s the thing. My house isn’t like other houses. My tribe of teens is led by someone different. I’ve noticed it before, when other people’s children came to play, but now I see it strongly reflected in my own. Here, it’s OK to be seventeen and still, somehow, see Father Christmas as a statement of fact, not one of wishful fantasy. It’s fine to want a ‘boy band’ haircut and unselfconsciously take a trip down memory lane with Rosie and Jim. Here, the presence of a big brother with Down’s syndrome allows you to be young, to be who you are, a mixture of heartbreaking innocence and slow awakening, to take your time in growing up.

When I explain that my son has Down’s syndrome to strangers or to new friends, so often the response is, if not sadness, then sympathy. Too often, we are so busy counting the deficits that we neglect to count the blessings.

Happy Christmas.

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